Dec. 16: What We’re Reading About the Cloud

Today is full of intrigue, at least in terms of relationships among IT vendors. Probably the most intriguing relationships involve Cisco and NetApp, and Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle, who teamed up to purchase much of Novell’s intellectual property. Elsewhere, AWS launched a new service enabling users to upload VMware images into its cloud, and CBR Online looks at the growing batch of open source BI vendors.

VM Import – Bring Your VMware Images to the Cloud (From the AWS blog) This is a big deal, but I wonder why VMware users would choose Amazon Web Services over a vCloud partner like Terremark or Bluelock. Maybe it’s the suite of AWS services available.

5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS (From the Netflix Tech Blog) Netflix’s Amazon Web Services use has been a hot topic of conversation lately, and understandably so. I wonder how many similarly designed companies it has inspired to look into the cloud.

Cisco and NetApp Are All Loved Up (From The Register) The Cisco-VMware-NetApp relationship is really quite confusing considering Acadia and the VCE alliance. Looks like EMC is becoming the odd man out.

Open Source BI: New Kids On the Block (From Computer Business Review) Analytics software is hot right now, and a few of these companies, at least, are doing really innovative. Jaspersoft, for example, has a package with RightScale, and Pentaho is pushing Hadoop.